World History and Family Dinner: On Rachel Laudan’s Cuisine and Empire

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1.Of all the methods by which I poisoned myself in college, my frequent trips to McDonald’s have assumed outsize shame in my adult conscience. Forget the cases of Utica Club, the double cranberry vodkas from the Village Tavern, the array of other substances with which I dulled my wits — in my embarrassed memory it is the Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese that bulked up my ass, muddled my judgment, and transformed me from the sylph-like high-schooler with good accessories and great skin, to a pallid, voracious, bleary-eyed monster. As years pass, my McDonald’s-going former self assumes increasingly monstrous proportions in my recollection — as Michael Pollan becomes ubiquitous in New York Times-reading households, books like Salt Sugar Fat hit the Terry Gross circuit, and news stories beam the equally ubiquitous “headless fatty” imagery into our living rooms. The specter of nine-year-olds so rotund they can barely fit into their schoolrooms has Michelle Obama doing arm-lifts with squads of youngsters. Today, I live down the street from a McDonald’s, but would no more eat there than I would take a crap in the aisle of the caddy-corner Whole Foods, where I buy even my cat food, where I scrupulously avoid the middle parts of the store unless it’s to get a box of organic pasta, or, if someone is coming over, water crackers upon which to spread my soft, fatty cheeses.

Imagine my shock, in this twin state of privilege and indoctrination, when a new book by a food historian invites me to imagine “burger joints more brightly lit than any monarch’s dining room,” places where “ordinary people…could feast on grilled beef on fluffy white bread, accented by a creamy sauce and fresh lettuce and tomato, with perfect French fries on the side. With the meal…a tall, icy drink, perhaps a shake of milk and ice cream or perhaps a sparkling cola.” As if that were a good thing. With no attendant come-down, no pronouncement about our path to dietary and moral ruin, this tableau, argues Rachel Laudan in her wonderful new book Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, represents in many ways the pinnacle of collective human ingenuity — the work of millennia during which cooks from royal kitchens to the hearths of the nameless masses figured out how to feed themselves and other people. McDonald’s and places like it represent, she says, “a welcome end to millennia of inequality forcibly expressed by culinary distinctions.”

Laudan’s scope, which is the entirety of food production in human history, may seem ludicrous, but her work is in the tradition of world history currently enjoying a kind of vogue. As Laudan told Elatia Harris in an interview, world historians have been “drawing on decades of detailed historical scholarship to see if they could trace big patterns of disease, warfare, enslavement, ecological change, and religious conversion. Why shouldn’t I jump into the fray and see if there were big patterns to be traced in food?” Her book thoroughly outlines these patterns, identifying a few major cuisines, what she calls “ordered styles of cooking,” that have played the greatest role in shaping human culinary styles and methods: the “Barley-Wheat Sacrificial Cuisines” of ancient empires located in and around the modern Middle East; the Buddhist Cuisines cohering in the third century B.C.E.; the transformative force of Islam, aided by Mongols; and then Christianity, which Laudan identifies as the major unifying force within European cuisine and then that of the Americas — first with the early Christian and Byzantine, then the Catholic cuisines of the Habsburg and Bourbon reigns, and finally in Protestant, republican cuisines. As she traces these currents, Laudan points out the way that engagement between these overlapping world realms created hybrids and permutations, with paella and pilau sharing the same family tree. As colonial empires expanded, the food of the colonized and enslaved was stamped with a colonial flavor, and vice versa.

Throughout history, class dictated the flavor and variety of one’s food, how much fat and sweet one got, and so forth. Cuisines were divided into the vastly different high and humble, and available to the elite and the non-elite accordingly. Modern cuisines are what Laudan calls “middling cuisines,” tasty food born of a confluence of a political ethos dissatisfied with centuries of monarchy, a mode of Christian religious thought the highest expression of which was the family meal, and a hitherto unimaginable access to food in quantity and variety. Modern, middling cuisines spread throughout the world with new ways to process wheat, meat, milk, fruit, and vegetables. In industrialized nations in the 20th century, non-elite cooks became able “to turn out a variety of different meals from different culinary traditions, instead of the nineteenth-century pattern of a weekly sequence of meals, or the yet-earlier pattern of a series of minor variations on pottage.”

Cuisine and Empire is complex and highly academic, but Laudan is a good writer and her owlish wit pops up just when your eyes are beginning to glaze at the varieties of millet (there are a lot of millets). There is nothing argumentative or prescriptive about her book — it is hard to argue with her assertion that “the problems of the diseases of plenty…are surely less appalling than the diseases of poverty.” But in our current American historical moment it seems breathtakingly transgressive, airing views I have hitherto encountered only on Size Acceptance blogs (which typically avoid defaming specific foods). Some of Laudan’s findings carry an implicit rejection of things that many of us have lately come to believe — that McDonald’s is the death knell of civilization, for one. She also neatly demonstrates the process by which certain ideas become dogma, and how our ideas about food change with our understanding of science, nutrition, religion, and the state at any given moment. Rousseau, as it happens, was one of the early adopters of the Slow Food Movement, believing “that what was natural was as little altered as possible, not an essence achieved by lengthy processing and cooking. Simply boiled vegetables, fresh fruit, and milk…were natural.” In fact, most interventions in food production have been met with backlash on scientific or moral grounds. Rousseau’s vegetables, milk, and fruit were themselves anathema to millennia of culinary philosophies, which held that food was not really food until it was cooked, and spiced, and had undergone a religio-scientific change that varied depending on one’s particular religious cosmology and ideas about nutrition.

2.Reading history typically does two paradoxical things: it tunes you in to the unique, specific fuckery and magic of your own moment, while simultaneously proving the old adage, “Same shit, different day.” Our peculiar historical moment is one in which Michael Pollan and his cohort have hardened hearts against the fast food hamburger, while the fast food hamburger remains the most available thing to eat in large tracts of the country. Children are told to eat their fruits and vegetables, and presented with lackluster pink wedges. Great swaths of Americans are hungry, while the non-hungry Instagram sumptuous meals. A recent New Yorker described an establishment with $15 to $27 entrees as “the ultimate neighborhood restaurant, the type of place where the food hits the sweet spot of being good (not to mention affordable)…” Food gentrification, Mikki Kendallwrote recently, puts “traditional meals out of reach for those who created the recipes.” Books like Wheat Belly and proponents of the so-called Paleo diet are slowly vilifying grain. (Laudan’s book does not mention this trend, but nothing could appear more farcical set against the backdrop of her scholarship, which tells us, basically, that grain is civilization. Liberty, even.)

Reading a book like Cuisine and Empire enriches the process by which you understand the world, both as you consider the grand sweep of history and assess your own troubled emotions regarding Hormel canned chili. All people are located within a dense web of spatial, financial, and cultural skeins that will dictate what they eat and how they prepare it. I found, reading Laudan, that even art was affected. Concurrent with Cuisine and Empire, I happened to read Anita Brookner’s perfect novel The Debut, and I was amazed by how much new information Laudan had equipped me to suss. The 1950s British heroine wishes to woo a man with chicken casserole; her parents’ louche middle class housekeeper advises her to bake the chicken in Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, but she opts instead for the fancy version from Larousse Gastronomique, with expensive leeks purchased from Harrods. Her father brings home a half-pound of tongue and a tin of artichoke hearts, after having a “cup of tea, heavily sugared, and served in broad shallow cups.”

I’ll take almost any opportunity to think about myself, but it seems important to think about one’s relationship with food, and it is soothing, while reading Cuisine and Empire, to do so against such a vast backdrop. I am a big eater, a “known pig,” as my husband put it recently when he came upon me circling the unattended Christmas turkey while others set the table. (I love the soft, dark, fatty parts of a bird’s undercarriage, but at every turkey feast I attend, the knife-wielding patriarch insists on carving a platter of bland, uniformly sliced white meat. I find myself angling for a quiet moment with the carcass, filching discarded pieces of skin from the sink, pulling a perfectly good neck out of the trash.) A known pig, but over the course of my 20s I have been successfully indoctrinated against certain kinds of fast food and most grocery items that come in packages, which leads to confused, contradictory, and offensive positions on things. I won’t eat a Keebler Snack Cake, but I will eat an entire salami. I spurn the Olive Garden, but regularly eat a calorie-laden burrito filled with God knows what. I see fellow bus-riders with translucent McDonald’s bags to be fed to young children and feel sad, disregarding my past encounters with the Quarter Pounder and the Whopper.

Reading Laudan’s book also happened to correspond with the anniversary of probably the most special thing in my personal food universe. Seven years ago, I moved to San Francisco and struck up a friendship with three boys who lived down the street, friends of friends I had met on a past visit to the city. On a whim one afternoon, trying to woo someone probably, I decided to make us all food. I got a bunch of chicken legs and thighs. I found a recipe on the Internet and marinated the chicken in yogurt with lime zest. I still remember how beautiful it smelled; my disappointment, when the chicken turned to charred lumps on the baking sheet, was considerable — the lime hardly perceptible on the blackened skin. Like all of the really important things that have happened in my life, this was such a non-momentous occasion, such an accident, that I routinely thank divine providence for the instincts of my friends and my unperceiving 22-year-old self. (Around the time I made the chicken, but not because of it, I struck up a romance with one of the boys. Within six months we were installed together in windowless apartment in Chinatown, and now we are married.)

On a Wednesday night shortly after the chicken incident, one of the boys decided to try something fancy — fish in parchment paper — and invited us all to eat it. Days later, a friend who lived in Oakland got accidentally drunk in San Francisco and stayed over for dinner; she and her husband showed up together the next Wednesday. The following week, their bandmate and her boyfriend came to what we began calling “Family Dinner.” Depending on a variety of factors — how many people were coming, how much cash people had at the time — the meal was either ambitious, or a staple from our childhood. I made a mis-spiced version of my mother’s spaghetti with clam sauce; my now-husband made Brunswick stew and strawberry salad. One of the boys made his Aunt Hazel’s meatloaf.

In her interview, Rachel Laudan told Elatia Harris that “the concept of family dinner, much lauded now the world over, is relatively new. The importance of the family meal as the foundation of society and the state is so deeply ingrained in the American tradition that it’s hard to appreciate just how American it is.” As young and extremely carefree 20-somethings who spent their weeknights drinking $5 pitchers of Busch at the now-defunct Jack’s Club, we conceived of Family Dinner as a pseudo-ironic mimicry of the middle class practice with which we had all grown up. But seven years later, we are still at it. The group has grown from four people to 16. We have a calendar and a Google group, and we get together around 49 Wednesdays out of the year, rotating between approximately seven dwellings. One person cooks, everyone else brings beer or sometimes wine. We even have a family name: We’re the Boehners, and we love each other.

We have had six weddings, one divorce, and four babies, with another one on the way. The kids go side by side in the host’s darkened bedroom, like a row of little pod people. (Our single bedroom also houses the sole bathroom, so when it’s our week we take the litter box out of the laundry room and put the babies there.) Sometimes our relation to one another seems more familial than friendly. There are moments when we think that all or some of us are kind of a pain in the ass. There has even been a feud. But we have gone from pals who like beer and got a kick out of kitschy weekly dinners, to friends who feed pets or mind one another’s children. People move away and many of them come back; my husband and I moved out of state for three years and returned, partially, I think, because Family Dinner had become the defining feature of our collective social lives, the anchor of our weeks.

Rachel Laudan told Harris, “Every time you go into the kitchen, you take your culture with you. As you plan a meal for guests, say, you bring to it assumptions about how to mesh their preferences with yours, about how much it is appropriate to spend on the meal, about how to accommodate their religious or ethical food rules, and about what they believe to be healthy and delicious.” The Boehners are all American. We are all members of what Laudan would call the “salaried middle class,” although technically some of us earn an hourly wage. We have all wandered away from some kind of faith tradition (Catholicism, Judaism, Mormonism, a variety of Protestantisms). Every one of us has been to college or beyond. We are all white.

As an eater, I embody my father — a self-described human garbage disposal, who wrote a letter to his parents from college telling them, “my whole life changed when I learned to eat raw onion.” But my mother is the source of my feelings about cooking. From her, I inherited the desire to be hospitable, without the finesse of her results. Her kitchen is always equipped with the makings for a nice salad. She sets the table beautifully. Entertaining figured large in her life because she was married to a diplomat; she tells a story about hosting a group of Moroccans and serving a gazpacho that not a single person touched for reasons that remain obscure. She is an elegant hostess, but she is hard on herself. And when it’s my turn for Family Dinner and I have a roomful of friends to feed, even these Boehners whom I love, who have seen me cry and fish turkey necks out of the trash, some panicked female spirit inhabits my body, makes break out in sweat over the stove, and snap at my husband.

My friends have Smitten Kitchen; my mother had The Silver Palate, The Joy of Cooking, and then those cookbooks that Rachel Laudan describes as being written “by highly educated middle- or upper-class women” to interpret foreign cuisines for American and British readers. Marcella Hazan’s “peasant hash” was a staple of our household. I continue the legacy with Claudia Roden’s seminal book The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, and despite the fact that only around four of the many, many recipes that I have followed to the letter have really turned out, I continue to select them for their wholesome “authenticity.” (Like an Anita Brookner heroine, I instinctively feel that nothing from my own food background can compare to “real” food cultures, where they put spoonfuls of mastic into ice water, or eat bergamot preserves.) I now believe that Roden’s recipes are actually terrible, or rather, the kind of recipes written for people who already know what they are doing and can thus interpret the shorthand of a veteran cook. But it’s not Claudia Roden’s fault that I make bizarre choices. Recently for one of my Family Dinners I found a dish of fried eggs and chicken livers in her book. Perfect, I thought. Wholesome, economical, and somehow chic. But my pan wasn’t hot enough, or something, and my eggs dispersed upon contact with my livers, and I ended up with a lumpy lukewarm mud that was unmistakably liver-based in an unpleasing way. We ran out of ketchup to mask the horror, and my accompanying “Tunisian soup” was just hot fish water. Only one Family Dinner has been worse (and really only its smell), when a gentleman Boehner made something called burgoo — a dish once enjoyed, says Laudan, by seamen in the British Navy — and filled his shared apartment with the odor of garbage.

Laudan writes that “national cuisines, like nations themselves, have been created in the last two hundred years,” “often in the last fifty or sixty,” and often in response to trends from elsewhere. And we’ve been through them. We’ve had “Italian” spag bol (“a popular Sunday dish in Britain”) and lasagna (“staple of the American table”). Moussaka, a Greek classic to which Laudan writes that béchamel was added in an effort to be Frenchy in the early 20th century. One of the Family Dinner superstars, who every year cooks a non-Kosher, utterly fantastic Passover Seder for 15 people, once made Japanese ramen, “the instant industrial version of which,” Laudan tells us was, invented after World War II. One of the best Family Dinners I can remember was put on by two of our artistic members, who did “Big Macs,” everything but the buns from scratch. The result was a beautiful, enormous, spectacularly tasty burger that looked the way the Big Mac does in the advertisements, the “grilled beef on fluffy white bread, accented by a creamy sauce and fresh lettuce and tomato” of Laudan’s description, the pinnacle of food access and middling cuisines. (None of us are vegetarians, and I don’t think it’s totally a coincidence that the one truly abstemious eater among us, who is gluten-avoidant and favors an ayurvedic view of nutrition, often doesn’t come.)

When one of our Boehner number was laid off and unemployed for a year, he kept up his rotation but, feeling we needed a reset from increasingly elaborate multi-course meals, heated up packaged tater tots and chicken nuggets and called it “Dad’s family dinner.” Early in the life of Family Dinner, if no one was equipped to cook, we got a bucket of Popeye’s, a practice which is still known as “Dysfunctional Family Dinner,” although now that we have grown in disposable income and fast food squeamishness, we usually get something else. It amazes me how easily that cruel moniker of “dysfunctional” came to us. Even without Laudan to tell us, we obviously share a core belief, presumably imparted by our parents and imbued with a fantastic amount of class privilege, that dinner, cooked by someone and eaten around the table together, is civilized practice, and that a deviation from this practice represents a personal or societal failure. My mother, most of our group’s respective mothers, had a hot a meal on the table many nights of my life. On the very few occasions when she sent my father and me to Burger King, we were encouraged to smuggle the Whoppers back inside of the house so that the neighbors wouldn’t see.

In Laudan’s conception, our middle class, middling cuisines come from a sea change in human history, and demonstrate her assertion that “nothing shows your independence more than being able to choose what you eat.” And in the Boehners, all of whom have had plenty to eat our whole lives, I see those qualities that Laudan ascribes to the early-modern Protestant cuisine that has most colored the American food experience: a rejection of asceticism, a belief in the family at table, a taste for “middling” foods. As Laudan puts it, “for the richer part of the world today, dining on high or humble cuisines is not a matter of class determined by one’s birth, but a matter of choice.” She is thinking of long-vanished imperial hierarchies, but, obviously, class still affects our food choices in significant ways. The foods that it is our privilege to scorn, enjoy, or mimic according to our mood, are often the foods most available to poor Americans, who are then shamed for eating them rather than the Rousseauian vegetables and milk. There is a mind-boggling grocery store across from my local McDonald’s; this is not the case in many neighborhoods.

On a personal level, Laudan herself can afford her long view of food history: as she told Harris, “I’ve never acquired a taste for fast-food hamburgers or soft drinks, have never eaten Wonder Bread or its siblings, and cook at home six nights out of seven.” Just as it is easy to call food poison when you don’t have to eat it, it’s arguably easy to call poison food in the same circumstances. But what I appreciate about Laudan is her sense of perspective. She urges us not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, and asks us to remember the centuries in which everyone but the highest elite ate “minor variations on pottage” achieved by backbreaking work (typically performed by women) that is still the norm in many parts of the world. In this context, a caloric and inexpensive meal of soft bread and meat is a revelation. At the rousing finish to her book, she tells us:

The challenge is to acknowledge that not all is right with modern cuisines without romanticizing earlier ones; to recognize that contemporary cuisines have problems with health and equity without jumping to the conclusion that this is new; to face up to new nutritional challenges of abundance without being paternalist or authoritarian; to extend the benefits of industrialized food processing to all those who still labor with pestles and mortars; and to realize that the problem of feeding the world is a matter not simply of providing enough calories but of extending to everyone the choice, the responsibility, the dignity, and the pleasure of a middling cuisine.

After reading Cuisine and Empire, I read The Last Banquet by Jonathan Grimwood, a novel about an Enlightenment-era French nobleman who concocts outlandish recipes in the years before the Revolution. Closing out his journal and recipe book before the mob arrives to slaughter him, the narrator writes: “the rest is history or will be for those who come to write it after us. I doubt they will be kind, and why would they? They will see our sins and forget our graces.” The longer Family Dinner goes on, the more real its 1950s nostalgia becomes (recently one of its members suggested that we all learn how to play bridge). It has become the churchgoing or the Shabbat dinner that gave order to our grandparents’ weeks. In Laudan’s probing but gentle gaze, we are just modern people, enjoying our middling cuisines on our own terms. Narrow your scope, and, like a family in a Formica add, we are the exemplars and beneficiaries of myriad injustices in American life: malign food politics, systemic racism, unequal distribution of wealth. Even with our small apartments and dingy towels, we are the lucky ones.

But there are graces to record. The way new parents relax into themselves while their babies sleep in the next room. The way a kitchen grows warm with laughter and the heat of the stove. The way food has made a fake family real. Like the Sufi poet said: “On the surface of the stew we are dollops of rich grease / And we befriend the yogurt-meatball soup.”

It began with a work assignment, but quickly started taking over all the rest of my time, too. My “to read” pile was soon filled up with books that had rural English landscapes on the cover, often with sheep silhouetted on the far-off crest of a hill. The sheep emoji crept to the top of the “recently used” tab on my phone and stayed there. Others started noticing my new fixation. When my boss emailed to thank me for doing her a favor, she wrote: “I owe you a drink/book about livestock.”

Writing about sheep, it turns out, is a thread that twists through 20th-century explorations of the British landscape, and one that I have become eager to unravel. I hesitate to call it a genre or canon (only in my fantasies can you walk into a bookshop and find a section labelled “sheep-writing”), but there is undoubtedly a process of inheritance at work here. From W.H. Hudson’s 1910 work A Shepherd’s Life to Amanda Owen’sThe Yorkshire Shepherdess last year, via Janet White’sThe Sheep Stell and the veterinary autobiographies of James Herriot, certain themes recur. Unlike more pastoral-inclined works about the countryside, these writings prioritize pragmatism and resist whimsy; the sense of place they evoke is bound up with the lives of the people who inhabit the landscape; and above all they foreground their labor, the work that is the reason they are in these places at all.

The book that set me off on this track is a newly-published one: James Rebanks’sThe Shepherd’s Life. Since its publication in the U.K. last month, this work has done what publishers hope for with non-fiction but rarely achieve: arrive at precisely the pinnacle of the public’s interest in a particular trend, somehow imbued with that elusive “must-read” quality that sends books to the top of bestseller lists and keeps them there. In Britain, demand for the so-called “new nature writing,” embodied in the work of authors like Robert Macfarlane and Helen Macdonald, is still high, although the inevitable backlash against the overwritten, self-indulgent prose that some of the movement’s authors display is already beginning. As a group, these authors are cozy and close-knit both professionally and personally, sometimes frustratingly so — a fellow editor at my own magazine has several times bemoaned the difficulty of trying to find knowledgeable-yet-impartial reviewers for these works.

This is partly why Rebanks’s book is so very appealing. As a full-time shepherd and a first-time author, he stands apart from this little scene. Although he’s very polite about it, the very premise of his book — that it is an account of a rural landscape and a traditional way of life written by someone who actively participates in it — is a riposte to all the books where a well-off man from the south of England visits a place and writes about how it makes him feel. Kathleen Jamie skewered this phenomenon with great precision in a review of Macfarlane for the London Review of Books in 2008:

“What’s that coming over the hill? A white, middle-class Englishman! A Lone Enraptured Male! From Cambridge! Here to boldly go, ‘discovering’, then quelling our harsh and lovely and sometimes difficult land with his civilized lyrical words.”

Inevitably, having the time and financial security to roam the hills and have noble thoughts about them is something only society’s most privileged can do. It is, therefore, no surprise that the new nature writing is by and large the preserve of already-successful male writers. The Wainwright Prize, the U.K.’s nature and travel-writing award, could only find one woman to shortlist this year, despite the fact that 2015 has been a prolific and successful year for British nature-writing. Once again it is Jamie, in an essay from her collection Findings, who really gets to the heart of this problem. In “Peregrines, Ospreys, Cranes,” she writes: “Between the laundry and the fetching kids from school, that’s how birds enter into my life.”

Rebanks, a Cumbrian shepherd farming in the area of northwest England where his family have worked for over six centuries, provides a refreshing counterpoint to all of this. His is a book that documents the rhythms of his work and its part in forming the landscape. Early on, he recalls how while his grandfather was teaching him to “wall” — that is, the ancient craft of fitting stones together so precisely that no mortar or bonding agent is required to keep the structure sound — some tourists stopped in their car to take photographs of them. Rebanks senior “murmured ‘bugger off’ under his breath” but knew that there only need be “a little bit of bad weather and they’d be gone to leave us to get on with stuff that mattered”. His grandson was hardly the first to record this observation. Shepherds must inhabit the landscape in all weathers. They have never had the luxury of going inside or driving away if the weather turns. In W.H. Hudson’s A Shepherd’s Life, an account of the author’s conversations with a Wiltshire shepherd named Caleb Bawcombe, we are told that “it is a life of simple, unchanging actions and of habits like instincts, of hard labor in sun and wind and rain from day to day, with its weekly break and rest, and of but few comforts and no luxuries.”

Rebanks echoes Hudson with the title he chose for his own work of sheep-writing, consciously placing his book in dialogue with it. He documents the profound effect that reading Hudson’s account of shepherding had on him as a teenager.

“Until I read this book, I thought books were always about other people, other places, other lives. This book, in all its glory, was about us (or at least the old Wiltshire version of us)…I felt I as if I could have worked with Caleb and talked sheepdogs, lame sheep, or the weather.”

The reason that Rebanks had grown up feeling excluded like this, despite living in the Lake District — one of the most written-about places in Britain — is because the popular image of his area does not include its farmers and laborers. It is a “landscape of the imagination,” as he puts it, created by William Wordsworth’s poetry, Alfred Wainwright’s walking guides, and countless other works. The Lakes are a “playground for an itinerant band of climbers, poets, walkers and daydreamers,” not the home of hard-working shepherds who build walls, mend fences, and tend their flocks. When he first realised this, he pointed it out to his dad, concerned about what their invisibility to writers and politicians might mean for their future. His father replied: “Don’t tell them, they’ll only ruin it.”

In order to persuade tourists to visit areas where shepherds still work in the old, traditional ways like the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales, these places are promoted as empty, lonely, even though the reality is anything but. It may look so to the visiting Lone Enraptured Male, transfixed by the sight of a shepherd cresting a hill surrounded by his charges, but the reality is very different. When shepherds write about their work, family and community are there on every page. Amanda Owen makes this abundantly clear in The Yorkshire Shepherdess, her book about Ravenseat, the remote hill farm in the Dales where she and her husband live and work. In her words, it is a breathless hive of activity, with life never slowing down for a second. As Owen puts it, they are “restocking Ravenseat with people,” and not just through their seven children:

We have guests staying in our shepherd’s hut, we have walkers stopping for a break and other visitors just driving up to sit in the sunshine, or the barn if it’s raining, and eat my cream teas. During the shooting season, we’ll see the shooting parties come up through the farmyards and out onto the moor, a real cross-section of people from beaters through to the well-heeled set who have come to spend the day grouse shooting.

The landscape is alive with people, working and visiting and living in among the sheep and their attendants. The empty vista on the postcards and in the poems is just a fantasy — an imagined topography that carefully excludes the people who make the landscape the way it is.

Writing about these places and their origins has long been part of the way shepherds interact with their land. They are not passing through, absorbing details to turn into extravagant, writerly prose. This writing is rooted, straightforward, connected to the place that inspired it. Janet White, in her own tale of a life lived with sheep, explains how she really came into her own as a writer once her Somerset farmhouse had a study with a view:

Working at my typewriter, I could look out over the sheep pens and fields to the high hills where the woods gave way to heathland and scattered holly trees were trimmed into hour-glass shapes by deer and ponies.

Aside from these longer narratives, all shepherds write about their sheep in something called a flock book, a record of the health and breeding pedigrees of all the individual animals. If the flock is sold, the book goes with it. They aren’t consulted that regularly though — experienced shepherds will carry most of this information in their heads. It gives shepherds the ability to “read” a flock, which amounts to so much more than just being able to estimate its monetary value. With a glance, they can assess the hundreds of tiny genetic variations on view and compute how they might mix with and improve the breed. They can see the history, the work, the choices that made those sheep the way they are.

The day I spent shepherding with James Rebanks, he tried to teach me what to look for in his best specimens. Nothing made him laugh more than my failure to tell a “Rolls Royce of a tup” from an indifferent woolly lump destined for sale as meat. Even with all my reading, there was only so much I could see as an outsider looking in.

These are not merely Cinderella love stories; in fact, they are not love stories at all. By the cynical reading, these novels are only about class, about becoming rich, becoming one of the rarefied beautiful people.

“Here I am writing about him again, like a vicious old man who promises that this will be the last drink of his life.” – Horacio Castellanos Moya

I.
If you’ve been tooling around the cross-referential world of Anglo-American literary blogs this fall, chances are you’ve come across an essay from the Argentine paper La Naçion called “Bolaño Inc.” Back in September, Scott Esposito of Conversational Readinglinked to the original Spanish. When Guernicapublished an English translation this month, we mentioned it here. The Guardianfollowed suit (running what amounted to a 500-word paraphrase). Soon enough, Edmond Caldwell had conscripted it into his ongoing insurgency against the critic James Wood. Meanwhile, the literary blog of Wood’s employer, The New Yorker, had posted an excerpt under the title: “Bolaño Backlash?”

The basic premise of “Bolaño Inc.” – that Roberto Bolaño, the late Chilean author of the novels The Savage Detectives and 2666, has become a kind of mythological figure hovering over the North American literary landscape – was as noteworthy as it was unobjectionable. One had only to read reports of overflow crowds of galley-toting twentysomethings at the 2666 release party in New York’s East Village to see that the Bolaño phenomenon had taken on extraliterary dimensions. Indeed, Esposito had already pretty thoroughly plumbed the implications of “the Bolaño Myth” in a nuanced essay called “The Dream of Our Youth.” But when that essay appeared a year ago in the online journal Hermano Cerdo, it failed to “go viral.”

So why the attention to “Bolaño Inc.?” For one thing, there was the presumable authority of its author, Horacio Castellanos Moya. As a friend of Bolaño’s and as a fellow Latin American novelist (one we have covered admiringly), Castellanos Moya has first-hand knowledge of the man and his milieu. For another, there was the matter of temperament. A quick glance at titles – the wistful “The Dream of Our Youth,” the acerbic “Bolaño Inc.” – was sufficient to measure the distance between the two essays. In the latter, as in his excellent novel Senselessness, Castellanos Moya adopted a lively, pugnacious persona, and, from the title onward, “Bolaño Inc.” was framed as an exercise in brass-tacks analysis. “Roberto Bolaño is being sold in the U.S. as the next Gabriel García Marquez,” ran the text beneath the byline,
a darker, wilder, decidedly un-magical paragon of Latin American literature. But his former friend and fellow novelist, Horacio Castellanos Moya, isn’t buying it.
Beneath Castellanos Moya’s signature bellicosity, however, beats the heart of a disappointed romantic (a quality he shares with Bolaño), and so, notwithstanding its contrarian ambition, “Bolaño Inc.” paints the marketing of Bolaño in a pallette of reassuring black-and-white, and trots out a couple of familiar villains: on the one hand, “the U.S. cultural establishment;” on the other, the prejudiced, “paternalistic,” and gullible American readers who are its pawns.

As Esposito and Castellanos Moya argue, the Bolaño Myth in its most vulgar form represents a reduction of, and a distraction from, the Bolaño oeuvre; in theory, an attempt to reckon with it should lead to a richer understanding of the novels. In practice, however, Castellanos Moya’s hobbyhorses lead him badly astray. Following the scholar Sarah Pollack, (whose article in a recent issue of the journal Comparative Literature is the point of departure for “Bolaño Inc.”), he takes the presence of a Bolaño Myth as evidence for a number of conclusions it will not support: about its origin; about the power of publishers; and about the way North Americans view their neighbors to the South.

These points might be so local as to not be worth arguing – certainly not at length – were it not for a couple of their consequences. The first is that Castellanos Moya and Pollack badly mischaracterize what I believe is the appeal of The Savage Detectives for the U.S. reader – and in so doing, inadvertently miss the nature of Bolaño’s achievement. The second is that the narrative of “Bolaño Inc.” seems as tailor-made to manufacture media consent as the Bolaño Myth it diagnoses. (“Bolaño was sooo 2007,” drawls the hipster who haunts my nightmares.) Like Castellanos Moya, I had sworn I wasn’t going to write about Bolaño again, at least not so soon. But for what it can tell us about the half-life of the work of art in the cultural marketplace, and about Bolaño’s peculiar relationship to that marketplace, I think it’s worth responding to “Bolaño Inc.” in detail.

II.
The salients of the Bolaño Myth will be familiar to anyone who’s read translator Natasha Wimmer‘s introduction to the paperback edition of The Savage Detectives. Or Siddhartha Deb‘s long reviews in Harper’s and The Times Literary Supplement. Or Benjamin Kunkel‘s in The London Review of Books, or Francisco Goldman‘s in The New York Review of Books, or Daniel Zalewski‘s in The New Yorker (or mine here at The Millions), or any number of New York Times pieces. Castellanos Moya offers this helpful précis:
his tumultuous youth: his decision to drop out of high school and become a poet; his terrestrial odyssey from Mexico to Chile, where he was jailed during the coup d’etat; the formation of the failed infrarealist movement with the poet Mario Santiago; his itinerant existence in Europe; his eventual jobs as a camp watchman and dishwasher; a presumed drug addiction; and his premature death.
Alongside the biographical Bolaño Myth, according to Castellanos Moya and Pollack, runs a literary one – that Bolaño has replaced García Márquez as the representative of “Latin American literature in the imagination of the North American reader.”

Relative to the heavy emphasis on the biography, mentions of García Márquez are less common in North American responses to The Savage Detectives. But one can feel, broadly, the way that familiarity with Bolaño now signifies, for the U.S. reader, a cosmopolitan intimacy with Latin American literature, as, for a quarter century, familiarity with García Márquez did. And this must be irritating for a Latin American exile like Castellanos Moya, as if every German one spoke to in Berlin were to say, “Ah, yes…the English language…well, you know, I’ve recently been reading E. Annie Proulx.” (Perhaps Proulx isn’t even the right analogue. How large does Bolaño loom in the Spanish-speaking world, anyway, assuming such a world (singular) exists? I’m told Chileans prefer Alberto Fuguet, and my friend in Barcelona had never heard of him until he became famous over here.)

One can imagine, also, the frustration a Bolaño intimate might have felt upon reading, in large-circulation publications, that the author nursed a heroin addiction…when, to judge by the available evidence, he didn’t. As we’ve written here, the meme of Bolaño-as-junkie seems to have originated in the Wimmer essay, on the basis of a misreading of a short story. That this salacious detail made its way so quickly into so many other publications speaks to its attraction for the U.S. reader: it distills the subversive undercurrents of the Bolaño Myth into a single detail, and so joins it to a variety of preexisting narratives (about art and madness; about burning out vs. fading away). Several publications went so far as to draw a connection between drug use and the author’s death, at age 50, from liver disease. This amounted, as Bolaño’s widow wrote to The New York Times, to a kind of slander.

And so “Bolaño Inc.” offers us two important corrections to the historical record. First, Castellanos Moya insists, Bolaño, by his forties, was a dedicated and “sober family man.” It is likely that this stability, rather than the self-destructiveness we find so glamorous in our artists, facilitated the writing of Bolaño’s major works. Secondly, Castellanos Moya reminds us of the difficulty of slotting this particular writer into any storyline or school. “What is certain,” writes Castellanos Moya, “is that Bolaño was always a non-conformist; he was never a subversive or a revolutionary wrapped up in political movements, nor was he even a writer maudit.” This is as much as to say, Bolaño was a writer – solitary, iconoclastic, and, in his daily habits, a little boring.

III.“Bolaño Inc.” starts to fall apart, however, when Castellanos Moya dates the origins of the Bolaño Myth to the publication of The Savage Detectives. In 2005, editors at Farrar, Straus & Giroux acquired the hotly contested rights to The Savage Detectives, reportedly for somewhere in the mid six figures – on the high end for a work of translation by an author largely “unknown” in the U.S. The posthumous appeal of Bolaño’s personal story no doubt helped the sale along.

FSG’s subsequent marketing campaign for the novel would emphasize specific elements of the author’s biography. “The profiles,” a former editor at another publishing house observed, “essentially wrote themselves.” Among the campaign’s elements were the online publication of what would become Wimmer’s introduction to the paperback edition. The hardcover jacket photo was a portrait of a scraggly Bolaño circa 1975. Castellanos Moya takes this as proof positive of a top-down crafting of the Bolaño myth (though Lorin Stein, a senior editor at FSG, told me, “I stuck that picture . . . on the book because it was my favorite and because it was in the period of the novel”).

As it would with 2666, FSG printed up unusually attractive galley editions, and carpet-bombed reviewers, writers, and even editors at other houses with a copy, “basically signaling to the media that this was their ‘important’ book of the year,” my editor friend suggested. When the book achieved sales figures unprecedented for a work of postmodern literature in translation “the standard discourse in publishing . . . was was that the publisher had ‘made’ that book.” Or, as Castellanos Moya puts it,
in the middle of negotiations for The Savage Detectives appeared, like a bolt from the blue, the powerful hand of the landlords of fortune, who decided that this excellent novel was the work chosen to be the next big thing.
But here Castellanos Moya begs the question: why did these particular negotiations entice FSG in the first place? He treats the fact that the book was “excellent” almost parenthetically. (And Pollack’s article is almost comical in its rush to bypass what she calls Bolaño’s “creative genius” – a quality that doesn’t lend itself to the kind of argumentation on which C.V.s are built these days.) Then again, it might be fair to say that excellence is an afterthought in the marketplace, as well.

Likely more attractive for FSG was the fact that, by 2006, much of the groundwork for the Bolaño Myth had already been laid. Over several years, New Directions, an independent American press, had already published – “carefully and tenaciously,” Castellanos Moya tells us – several of Bolaño’s shorter works. New Directions was clearly not oblivious to the fascination exerted by the author himself (to ignore it would have amounted to publishing malpractice). The jacket bio for By Night In Chile, published in 2003, ran to an unusually detailed 150 words: arrest, imprisonment, death… By the following year, when Distant Star hit bookshelves, the head-shot of a rather gaunt-looking Bolaño had been swapped out for a fantastically moody portrait of the black-clad author in repose, inhaling a cigarette. These translations, by Chris Andrews, won “Best Books of the Year” honors from the major papers on both coasts, and led to excerpts in The New Yorker.

Nor can the initial development of the Bolaño Myth be laid at the feet of New Directions. Lest we forget, the sensation of The Savage Detectives began in 1999, when the novel won the Rómulo Gallegos prize, the preeminent prize for Spanish language fiction. Bolaño’s work in Spanish received glowing reviews from the TLS, almost all of which included a compressed biography in the opening paragraph.

In fact, the ultimate point of origin for the Bolaño myth – however distorted it would ultimately become – was Bolaño himself. Castellanos Moya avers that his friend “would have found it amusing to know they would call him the James Dean, the Jim Morrison, or the Jack Kerouac of Latin American literature,” and Bolaño would surely have recoiled from such a caricature. But his fondness for reimagining his life at epic scale is as distinctive an element in his authorial sensibility as it is in Philip Roth‘s. It is most pronounced in The Savage Detectives, where he rewrites his own youth with a palpable, and powerful, yearning. So complete is the identification between Bolaño and his fictional alter-ego, Arturo Belano, that, when writing of a rumored movie version of The Savage Detectives, Castellanos Moya confuses the former with the latter.

At any rate, Castellanos Moya has the causal arrow backward. By the time FSG scooped up The Savage Detectives, Bolaño’s “reputation and legend” were already “in meteoric ascent” (as a 2005 New York Times piece put it) both in the U.S. and abroad. The blurbs for the hardcover edition for The Savage Detectives were drawn equally from reviews of the New Directions editions and from publications like Le Monde des Livres, Neuen Zurcher Zeitung, and Le Magazine Littéraire – catnip not for neo-Beats or Doors fanatics but for exactly the kinds of people who usually buy literature in translation. And it was after all a Spaniard, Enrique Vila-Matas, who detected in The Savage Detectives a sign
that the parade of Amazonian roosters was coming to an end: it marked the beginning of the end of the high priests of the Boom and all their local color.
A cynical reading of “Bolaño Inc.” might see it less as a cri de coeur against “the U.S. cultural establishment” than as an outgrowth of sibling rivalry within it. One imagines that the fine people at New Directions have complicated feelings about a larger publisher capitalizing on the groundwork it laid, and receiving the lion’s share of the credit for “making” The Savage Detectives. (Just as Latin American writers might feel slighted by the U.S. intelligentsia’s enthusiastic adoption of one of their own.) At the very least, it’s worth at noting that New Directions, a resourceful and estimable press, in Castellanos Moya’s account and in fact, is also his publisher.

IV.On second thought, it is a little anachronistic to imagine that either publisher figures much in the larger “U.S. cultural establishment.” To be sure, it would be naïve to discount the role publishers and the broader critical ecology play in “breaking” authors to the public. There are even books, like The Lost Symbol or Going Rogue, whose bestseller status is, like box-office receipts of blockbusters, pretty much assured by the time the public sees them. But The Savage Detectives was not one of these. The amount paid for the book “was not exorbitant enough to warrant an all-out Dan Brown-like push,” one editor told me. “Books with that price tag bomb all the time.” And Lorin Stein noted that The Savage Detectives
surpassed our expectations by a long shot. How many 600-page experimental translated books make it to the bestseller list? You can’t work that sort of thing into a business plan.I’m thinking here of Péter Nádas‘ A Book of Memories – an achievement comparable to The Savage Detectives, and likewise published by FSG, but not one that has become totemic for U.S. readers. Castellanos Moya might attribute Nádas’ modest U.S. sales to the absence of a compelling “myth.” But we would already have come a fair piece from the godlike “landlords of the market,” descending from their home in the sky to anoint “next big things.” And the sluggish sales this year of Jonathan Littell‘s The Kindly Ones – another monumental translation with a six-figure advance and a compelling narrative attached – further suggest that the landlords’ power over the tenants is erratic, or at least weakening.

Indeed, it is “Bolaño Inc.”‘s treatment of these tenants – i.e. readers – that is the most galling element of its argument. The Savage Detectives, Castellanos Moya insists, offers U.S. readers a vision of Latin America as a kind of global id, ultimately reaffirming North American pieties
like the superiority of the protestant work ethic or the dichotomy according to which North Americans see themselves as workers, mature, responsible, and honest, while they see their neighbors to the South as lazy, adolescent, reckless, and delinquent.
As Pollack puts it,
Behind the construction of the Bolaño myth was not only a publisher’s marketing operation but also a redefinition of Latin American culture and literature that the U.S. cultural establishment is now selling to the public.
Castellanos Moya and Pollack seem to want simultaneously to treat readers as powerless before the whims of publishers and to indict them for their colonialist fantasies. (This is the same “public” that in other quarters gets dunned for its disinterest in literature in translation, and in literature more broadly.) Within the parameters of the argument “Bolaño Inc.” lays out, readers can’t win.

But the truth is that U.S. readers of The Savage Detectives are less likely to use it as a lens on their neighbors to the south than as a kind of mirror. From Huckleberry Finn onward, we have been attracted to stories of recklessness and nonconformity wherever we have found them. When we read The Savage Detectives, we are not comforted at having sidestepped Arturo Belano’s fate. We are Arturo Belano. Likewise, the Bolaño Myth is not a story about Latin American literature. It is a dream of who we’d like to be ourselves. In its lack of regard for the subaltern, this may be no improvement on the charges “Bolaño Inc.” advances. But the attitude of the U.S. metropole towards the global south – in contrast, perhaps, to that of Lou Dobbs – is narcissistic, not paternalistic. Purely in political terms, the distinction is an important one.

V.
Moreover, Pollack’s quietist reading of the novel (at least as Castellanos Moya presents it) condescends to Bolaño himself, and is so radically at variance with the text as to be baffling. The Savage Detectives, she writes, “is a very comfortable choice for U.S. readers, offering both the pleasures of the savage and the superiority of the civilized.” Perhaps she means this as an indictment of the ideological mania of the Norteamericano, who completely misses what’s on the page; such an indictment would no doubt be “a very comfortable choice” for the readers of Comparative Literature. But to write of the novel as exploring “the difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth,” as James Wood has, is far from reading it as a celebration of the joys of bourgeois responsibility.

Instead, The Savage Detectives offers a disquieting experience – one connected less to geography than to chronology. Bolaño is surely the most pan-national of Latin American writers, and his Mexico City could, in many respects, be L.A. It’s the historical backdrop – the 1970s – that give the novel its traction with U.S. readers. (In this way, the jacket photo is an inspired choice.)

The mid-’70s, as Bolaño presents them, are a time not just of individual aspirations, but of collective ones. Arturo and Ulises seem genuinely to believe that, confronted with a resistant world, they will remake it in their own image. Their failure, over subsequent years, to do so, is not a comforting commentary on the impossibility of change so much as it is a warning about the death of our ability to imagine progress – to, as Frederic Jameson puts it, “think the present historically.” Compare the openness of the ’70s here to the nightmarish ’90s of 2666. Something has been lost, this novel insists. Something happened back there.

The question of what that something was animates everything in The Savage Detectives, including its wonderfully shattered form, which leaves a gap precisely where the something should be. And this aesthetic dimension is the other disquieting experience of reading book – or really, it amounts to the same thing. In the ruthless unity of his conception Bolaño discovers a way out of the ruthless unity of postmodernity, and the aesthetic cul-de-sac it seemed to have led to. Seemingly through sheer willpower, he became the artist he had imagined himself to be.

VI.
This is the nature of the hype cycle: if the Bolaño backlash augured by The New Yorker‘s “Book Bench” materializes, it will not be because readers have revolted against the novel (though there are readers whom the book leaves cold) but because they have revolted against a particular narrative being told about it. And Castellanos Moya, with his impeccable credentials and his tendentious but seductive account of the experience The Savage Detectives offers U.S. readers, provides the perfect cover story for those who can’t be bothered to do the reading. That is, “Bolaño Inc.” offers readers the very same enticements that the Bolaño Myth did: the chance to be Ahead of the Curve, to have an opinion that Says Something About You. Both myth and backlash pivot on a notion of authenticity that is at once an escape from commodification and the ultimate commodity. Bolaño had it, the myth insists. His fans don’t, says “Bolaño Inc.” But what if this authenticity itself is a construction? From what solid ground can we render judgment?

For a while now, I’ve been thinking out loud about just this question. One reader has accused me of hostility to the useful idea that taste is as constructed as anything else, and to the “hermeneutics of suspicion” more generally. I can see some of this at work in my reaction to “Bolaño Inc.” But the hermeneutics of suspicion to which Castellanos Moya subscribes should not mistake suspicion for proof of guilt. Indeed, it should properly extend suspicion to itself.

It may be easier to build our arguments about a work of art on assumptions about “the marketplace,” but it seems to me a perverse betrayal of the empirical to ignore the initial kick we get from the art that kicks us – the sighting of a certain yellow across the gallery, before you know it’s a De Kooning. Yes, you’re already in the gallery, you know you’re supposed to be looking at the framed thing on the wall, but damn! That yellow!

When I revisit my original review of The Savage Detectives – a book I bought because I liked the cover and the first page, and because I’d skimmed Deb’s piece in Harper’s – I find a reader aware of the star-making machinery, but innocent of the biographical myth to which he was supposed to be responding. (You can find me shoehorning it in at the end, in a frenzy of Googling.) Instead, not knowing any better, I began by trying to capture exactly why, from one writer’s perspective, the book felt like a punch in the face. This seems, empirically, like a sounder place to begin thinking about the book than any preconception that would deny the lingering intensity of the blow. I have to imagine, therefore, that, whatever their reasons for picking up the book, other readers who loved it were feeling something similar.

Not that any of this is likely to save us from a Bolaño backlash. Castellanos Moya’s imagining of the postmodern marketplace as a site with identifiable landlords – his conceit that superstructure and base can still be disentangled – has led him to overlook its algorithmic logic of its fashions. The anomalous length and intensity of Bolaño’s coronation (echoing, perhaps, the unusual length and intensity of his two larger novels) and the maddening impossibility of pinning down exactly what’s attributable to genius and what’s attributable to marketing have primed us for a comeuppance of equal intensity.

But when the reevaluation of Bolaño begins in earnest – and again, in some ways it might serve him well – one wants to imagine the author would prefer for it to respond to, and serve, what’s actually on the page. Of course the truth is, he probably wouldn’t give a shit either way. About this, the Myth and its debunkers can agree: Roberto Bolaño would probably be too busy writing to care.

9 comments:

“assess your own troubled emotions regarding Hormel canned chili.” Speak for yourself. Just as it is possible for the well-rounded (in mind, not in body) reader to enjoy Stephen King and Karl Ove Knausgaard (I love both of them), it is equally possible for the adventurous gourmand to enjoy canned food and a well-prepared Roquefort Pear Salad. I grew up somewhat poor, eating badly at times through no fault of my own, but this didn’t stop me from discovering MFK Fisher or Brillat-Savarin, nor did it hinder me from learning how to cook elaborate soups from homemade stock and prepare grand banquets for friends.

I’m now beginning to see how you went wrong, Lydia. The first part of this piece starts off as a promising personal essay (and returns to this when you mention your husband). It is when you attempt to project these memories onto the books you write about, often in bizarre ways, that you fall apart. Reading is about learning from other minds and other perspectives, following various threads of thought and emotion (and tracking them for other readers when you can, because that is the noble and generous thing to do). The indolent “editors” here at The Millions or The Awl will never tell you this. Because they aren’t interested in seeing you improve as a writer, much less helping you refine your argument or hone your ability to observe. They’d rather throw you under the bus because they want content. And if they don’t get it from you, they’ll get it from some twentysomething schmuck hoping to enter this ever diminishing racket.

Real editors make their writers look good by any means necessary, are generous, exceedingly patient of eccentric temperaments, constantly question themselves, and defend their writers not out of a zombie brand loyalty (as we see here and at Slate, which is slightly more odious), but only after they know they have gone the distance. They also address criticism and respond to as eloquently as they can — as we saw with that Bill Simmons apology the other day.

Conflation is conflation. And the sooner you learn how to question your takeaway, to look at your opinions from more angles than you know what to do with, the sooner you’ll become stronger as a writer. Janet Malcolm, Renata Adler, Michelle Orange: these are the people to study and learn from if you’re going to write these pieces.

Of course, given that this website is run by a bunch of smug midcult egomaniacs more enamored with foolishly announcing “the only list you’ll need,” I’m certain my entreaties will fall on deaf ears, with the usual cowardly and anonymous losers wasting hours of their lives chanting my name in the comments — as they did in that dreadful Matt Bell thread, \which The Millions should be ashamed of itself in perpetuating. The Millions isn’t about nourishing and cultivating writers, or even making them look good. It’s about getting anything it can from them: hounding them for Year in Reading entries, taking advantage of their kindness and sensitivity, extracting free essays from writers who have been nagged to generate publicity for a forthcoming book in some way and are under more pressure than the editors here can ever know, and so forth. It’s a filthy operation — perhaps not as baleful as the “no haters” policy at BuzzFeed, but not so far removed. Like all combinations of arrogance and stupidity, it deserves nothing less than contempt.

Good heavens, E. Champion! I was looking for comments on the subject at hand, and here you are laying about with your truncheon, rather indiscriminately. And all before 8 a.m. Among many reasons for reading a book, or a book review, is that it presents us with interesting, chewy subject matter that enlightens aspects of our own life, and is the base for interesting discussion. Lydia’s review does this. I do wish she and other internet writers were being paid fairly for their contributions.

Oh, the joys of “Family Dinner.” My three housemates and I had a similar arrangement for our final two years of undergrad, and it unfolded in the same manner (friendly into familial) as yours. As the four of us were from very opposite corners of the country, we often used each Sunday’s dinner as a chance to introduce the others to our regional mainstays. I had the honor of introducing three corn and steak Americans to the joy that is New Jersey’s culinary crown jewel: Taylor Ham. Another friend is responsible for showing me the light that is green chili. Almost always, the results were met with enthusiasm, and the plates were cleaned… except for one time, when our roommate of Ohio origin decided to unleash upon us the terror of Skyline Chili.

For those that do not have a sizable chunk of their family located in Texas and the Southwest (as I do), it’s difficult to fully grasp how shocking it is to be served a bean-less chili. Moreso: how shocking it is to be served a bean-less chili on top of spaghetti, and covered in a liberal dollop of shredded Kraft cheese. The thing is horrifying. Bean-less chili is not chili in my book; it’s a runny sloppy joe. As a New Jerseyan born and bred, I also take issue with the desecration of perfectly good pasta products.

Nevertheless, the experience didn’t dull my appreciation of the Family Dinner, just as I’m sure even your smelliest and least successful entrees didn’t dull yours, Lydia. Without that ambitious Buckeye of a roommate, I might’ve wandered into the horror of Skyline on my own, without being surrounded by the support group of my closest friends, all undoubtedly brought so close by our weekly mealtime ritual.

Does anyone know why Ed Champion hates The Millions so much? I happen to like them both. Lydia, I love the way you write, the personal always interwoven with the books you review. Never once have I gotten bored while reading your posts, even when I haven’t read the book, even when I don’t plan to read the book. You make reading the personal activity it is and your reviews are like short stories.

I too enjoy the book-review/ personal essay hybrid style of Lydia’s pieces. This one was particularly good. It made me think about my food and cooking habits and their origins in my upbringing/ socio-economic background. It also made me want to read the book.

Nice piece, Lydia — quite thoughtful and funny, and speaking about it from a personal perspective is important, because we’re all deeply enmeshed in the food culture we live in. It’s worth noting that Rachel Laudan was a historian of geology in the 80s (and she’s still cited a lot) before she made the jump to food history. Which is all to say that she’s got the historical chops, which is just great. Contemporary debates about food need someone to say, “all of this food preference stuff is really historically situated, and no, I’m not talking about our anthropocene ancestors, for chrissake.” Or maybe that’s just what I want to say. In any case, I’ll have to pick up Laudan’s book, because I want to she what she makes of “Empire” part of her title. I’ll probably flip past the millet part.

This piece was a really lovely, thoughtful and well-written. It was layered and delicious and complex. Really enjoyed it and it led me to consider not only the titles discussed, but my own history of a version of their family dinner.

But that diatribe by Edward Champion is good for one reason only – to become aware of an obvious psychopath and learn to never so much as shake his hand too hard or too soft.

His post was alternately vicious and nonsensical and if I ever run across the guy, I’m running away, fast. He’s the online analog to the crazy neighbor that you’re warned to stay the fuck away from or you’ll get your nuts cut off in the middle of the night – for no reason at all other than you breathed next to him.

This was the first I’ve heard of E. Champion and the last I ever want to. How do people like him get any attention? He threatens to publicly vilify you unless you publish his typing? He calls in a chit with some street thug and you get a letter threat against your family? He tells you unless you work with him, consider your life in danger forever? What a total scrapheap of a human – get some therapy fast, buddy, (preferably inpatient and long-term).